plawolf
Lieutenant General
It would be a mistake to think DeepSeek are just being naive and idealistic here to gift their model to all of humanity.
You need to remember who they are and what their day jobs are. If anyone could have predicted the magnitude of impact DeepSeek would have on the NASAQ, it’s these guys.
They didn’t release DeepSeek fully out of some idealistic naïveté, but because it was a carefully weighed decision to both maximise their own profits from this breakthrough, as well as cause maximum damage to the strong enemy.
If they kept it as a closed book proprietary model, the market impact would have been far far smaller, barely a blip as everyone just shrugged and moved on since the market would expect the western AI oligarchs to do their thing and got DeepSeek banned in America, Europe and everywhere else they can and massively limit the market DeepSeek can operate in, which in turn will also massively limit its potential revenue. Add in the inevitable massed and sustained cyberattacks and they would be luck to make any sort of meaningful profits from it.
If they shorted NVIDIA and other obvious targets’ stocks before the release, DeepSeek could have made them billions overnight.
Given the choice between pressing send and making billions overnight or spending then next decade fighting the collective west to carve out some tiny market share to maybe make a few million, what would you choose? Kneecapping America’s collective hyper scale AI industry on the way is just a nice bonus.
